Directional couplers, which are electronic devices that can detect power being transmitted in a particular direction, are used in a wide variety of radio frequency (RF) circuits. For example, a directional coupler may be used in a radar system to detect a reflected wave by separating the indecent wave from the reflected wave, or may be used in a circuit that measures the impedance mismatch of transmission lines. Functionally, a directional coupler has a forward transmission path and a coupled transmission path. The forward transmission path generally has a low loss, while the coupled transmission path couples a fraction of the transmission power that is propagated in a particular direction. There are many different types of coupler architectures that include electromagnetic couples and magnetic couplers. Each of these coupler types may be implemented using different topologies and materials depending on the frequency of operation and the operational environment.
For example, a directional coupler may be implemented using stripline structures disposed on a printed circuit board (PCB) or transformers. In some stripline implementations, various circuit elements may be as long as a quarter wavelength of the particular signal being measured. For applications that operate at frequencies between 500 MHz and 3 GHz, which covers the frequency range at which many cellular telephones operate, constructing stripline directional couplers on an integrated circuit becomes challenging dues to the wavelengths at these frequencies being much longer than the feature sizes on the integrated circuit. Low-loss magnetic-based directional couplers also are challenging to construct at this range of frequencies because of transformer losses and parasitics.